Windows Vista ScreenshotActually I haven’t and none of my friends or co-workers have moved yet to Windows Vista.

However, Dell did and now it seems the company is Switching back to Windows XP. Never in any previous version of Windows I remember this lack of enthusiasm about a new release and resistance to upgrade.

Is it Linux may be?… Many are saying that Vista’s older brother, Windows XP, is its main competitor and I think this is right because of many reasons…There are certain number of things that we want the operating system to do for us and they are offered with Windows XP, actually most of them where since Windows 95 which, at the time, people said about it “This is how Windows should have been in the first place”. Windows XP also fixed security weaknesses and stability issues of 95, the same thing was done even in Windows 2000.

So features, stability and reliability are all there in XP but being cool, modern and more fashionable doesn’t win you popularity in the world of production. I am one of many people who “made switching to classical windows theme” the last step of any new installation of Windows XP and the reason is standardization; it doesn’t really matter if doing certain job on a PC is less ergonomic in one way or another, what matters is whether I know how to do it and practiced it for a long or is it new and need me to figure it out.

It is not practical to attend a driving course every time you buy a new vehicle. But Microsoft kept fooling us every new version of Windows with moving icons around; e.g. between control panel and the administrative tools, or by changing files names or directory structure like the “document and settings” versus the old “user profile”, not to mention the cosmetic fashion when one day it imposes the 3D buttons and the next day buttons go flat, to round or not to round a rectangle’s corners, and even using transparent and irregular shaped windows or use just simple opaque rectangle.

The matter of the fact is that standardization is the most important issue in an operating system after reaching maturity.